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Watermelon Sherbet
Scrape all the red pulp of the melon, carefully saving the juice and having sufficient melon to give strength of flavour. Allow to one gallon of liquid a pound of sugar and freeze. (This may be varied by adding lemon flavouring and juice, or sherry.) When half frozen add the whipped whites of eggs (one for each quart of the mixture) and finish the freezing.
A four-ingredient water ice from the era of the hand-cranked freezer. The proportions are given for a gallon batch, which is far more than a home churn holds today, and the sugar is low even for its own time.
- Scale it downA gallon of liquid suits a commercial or large family freezer packed with ice and rock salt. Most domestic machines take 1 to 1.5 quarts of mixture, so work in quarts: 1 quart juice, 4 oz (about 1/2 cup) sugar by the original ratio.
- How much melonA 10-lb watermelon yields roughly 6 cups of strained juice and pulp. Scrape the flesh away from the pale rind, then press it through a sieve or pulse and strain it; seeds and fibre make the finished sherbet gritty.
- The sugar is very lowA pound to the gallon is about 11 percent sugar by weight, which will freeze into a solid block rather than a scoopable sherbet. Modern sorbets run 20 to 28 percent. Expect to increase the sugar substantially, tasting the unfrozen juice: it should be noticeably sweeter than you want the finished ice to be, since cold mutes sweetness.
- Lemon is not optional in practiceWatermelon juice is low in acid and tastes flat once frozen. The suggested lemon juice, about 2 tablespoons per quart, is what makes the flavour read as watermelon at all.
- Sherry and freezing pointAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so the sherry variation will stay soft and may never set firm in a domestic freezer. Keep it to a tablespoon or two per quart.
- "Freeze" means churnThe original assumes constant agitation in an ice-and-salt freezer. Still-freezing in a tray gives coarse crystals; use an ice cream machine, or freeze in a shallow pan and break up the mass with a fork every 30 minutes.
- The egg whitesWhipped whites folded in at the half-frozen stage lighten the texture and keep the ice from setting hard, the same job Italian sorbets do with meringue. They are never cooked here, so use pasteurised whites if you are serving anyone vulnerable to salmonella.
- Yield and servingA quart of mixture serves four to six. Serve within a day or two; with this little sugar it turns icy fast in a modern deep freezer.
Sherbet reaches English through Turkish and Persian from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened, often acidulated drink, and only in the nineteenth century did the English word settle on a frozen dessert made with water or juice rather than the custard base of ice cream. Recipes like this one belong to the age of the hand-cranked freezer, patented in the United States in the 1840s and a fixture of American kitchens by the 1880s, which put churned ices within reach of any household that could get a block of ice and a bag of rock salt. Watermelon was the obvious candidate: cheap, abundant in late summer, mostly water already, and impossible to keep once cut. The instruction to allow "sufficient melon to give strength of flavour" is a reminder that melons then, as now, varied wildly in sweetness and perfume, and that the cook was expected to taste rather than measure.